Published 4:00 am, Saturday, March 6, 2004

Two scientists from President Bush's top advisory board on cutting- edge medical research published a detailed criticism Friday of the board's own reports, and said the board skewed scientific facts in service of a political and ideological cause.

The authors -- one is a member of the president's Council on Bioethics and the other a renowned UCSF biologist fired from the council last week -- have accused the council's chairman, Leon Kass, of ignoring their scientific advice and refusing to include in the board's last report some information that would challenge Bush's restrictions on stem cell research.

Their allegations mark the sharpest public split yet within the council, formed in 2001 to guide U.S. policy through the increasingly difficult ethical terrain of such fields as cloning, in-vitro fertilization, and embryonic stem- cell research.

The authors of the critique published Friday were two of only three full- time scientists on the council. They said the council's last report, "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," did not make clear that a wave of recent scientific research has cast doubt on the potential of adult stem cells -- a type of cell that Bush held up as a promising alternative when he announced his restrictions on the use of embryonic cells.

Although the council is supposed to provide impartial advice to Bush, one of the scientists said Friday that its reports seemed to be driven by a preexisting agenda and did not accurately portray the scientific underpinnings of the ethical issues the council was grappling with.

"There is always this strong implication (in the reports) that medical research is not what God intended, that there is something unnatural about it, " said Elizabeth Blackburn, a UCSF biologist who was fired from the panel last Friday. "We had a great many comments on the report, and they would just make little changes that didn't fully address them."

A spokesperson for Kass said that he had no comment on the allegations and that the scientific comments of Blackburn and Janet Rowley, a University of Chicago biologist who co-wrote the critique, are adequately represented in the council's reports.

Their critique was published online Friday by the journal PLoS Biology. It adds to growing criticism from scientists that the Bush administration is manipulating the scientific advice it receives on politically charged issues, ranging from climate change to mercury contamination.

The critique published Friday focuses on two council reports, "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," issued in October, and "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," issued in January.

The two scientists' critique alleges that the "Beyond Therapy" report unfairly characterizes research into prolonging healthy life as being dominated by scientists who are driven by the goal of immortality. The report, they write, "falls short of explaining the serious challenge of preventing and curing age-related disease to extend health -- very different from attempting immortality."

Blackburn said that she had submitted a letter to the journal Science, outlining the problems with that report, but that Kass ordered her to withdraw the letter, which she did.

In another section of their critique, Blackburn and Rowley list a series of problems with the stem cell report. The cumulative effect of the problems, Blackburn said, is to overstate the current research promise of adult stem cells and play down the potential of embryonic stem cells, which are created by destroying a human embryo.

To its critics, embryonic stem-cell research amounts to taking a human life -- an objection that does not apply to the adult cells, which can be extracted from a person's body without harm.

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